Introduction to Engineering

Lina J. Karam received her BS degree in engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1989, and earned her MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1995, respectively. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Arizona State University. She is currently the director of the Image, Video, and Usability, the MultiDimensional DSP, and the Real-Time Embedded Signal Processing laboratories in the Department of Electrical Engineering at ASU. Her research interests are in the areas of image and video processing, compression, and transmission; human visual perception; multidimensional signal processing; error-resilient source coding; digital filter design; and biomedical imaging. From 1991 to 1995, she was a research assistant in the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center and then in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She has worked at Schlumberger WellServices (Austin, TX), and in the Signal Processing Department of AT&T Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ) in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Prof. Karam is the recipient of a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She served as the Chair of the IEEE Communications and Signal Processing Chapters in Phoenix in 1997 and 1998. She was a member of the organizing committees of the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP99), the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP00), the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP08), and Asilomar 2008. She is the Technical Program Chair of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP09). She is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and is serving on the editorial board of the Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing Journal. She also served as an associate editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2004 to 2006, and as a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Conference Board. She is an elected member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society's DSP Technical Committee, and of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee. She is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the Signal Processing and Circuits and Systems societies of the IEEE. Naji Mounsef received his BS degree (magna cum laude) in computer and communication engineering from Notre Dame University (NDU), Lebanon, in 2004, and his MS degree in computer and communication engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2005. While at NDU, he served as a teaching assistant in circuits, electronics, logic design, and digital signal processing laboratories. From 2004 to 2005, he was also a teaching assistant at the AUB in digital signal processing and digital image processing laboratories, for which he wrote a laboratory manual. During the same period, he worked as a research assistant at AUB and worked on problems related to software radio and efficient turbo decoding. After teaching for a semester at NDU and AUB, he joined the PhD program in Electrical Engineering (2006) at the Arizona State University (ASU), where he first worked as a research assistant and then as a teaching assistant. In summer 2008, he interned at the Translational Genomics Institute. He is part of the Image, Video, and Usability (IVU) laboratory in the Electrical Engineering Department of ASU, and his research areas include image processing and genomic signal processing.